This study proposes a method for identifying unknown external forces that act on slender flexible bodies. In this method, the external force is represented as an expansion in the Chebyshev polynomials. The expansion coefficients are determined to minimize the number of nonzero coefficients and the difference between the measured and estimated quantities. An under-relaxation scheme is applied to enhance the robustness of computations for the identification. Static and dynamic beam problems are solved using the method to examine how well it can reconstruct the external forces. Numerical computations and analyses of the results demonstrate that the method generally produces a satisfactory external force reconstruction, and its accuracy is sensitive to the choice of measuring device.